With that simple message sent at 9:50pm PST on the 21st of March, 2006, Jack Dorsey launched Twitter.

Dorsey was one member of a group of directors of podcasting company Odeo, with the idea for Twitter being a result of a day long brainstorming session. The group made plans to create an online communication tool that replicated the SMS texting experience. Shortened and abbreviated messages with a maximum of 140 characters; communication between two members who both ‘follow’ each other. A soft launch of Twitter was made available for employees of Odeo before it was publicly launched in July, 2006.

Finding it’s Tweet

Although it was replicating the SMS experience, there was no intention for Twitter to be a competitor to texting. And even with direct competition from other social media mediums, at the time Twitter was considered incomparable.

Twitter’s watershed moment came during the 2007 South by Southwest Interactive conference (SXSWi). In the lead up to the event the site was averaging 20,000 ‘tweets’ per day, but this figure tripled to 60,000 after the event due to word of mouth and the clever placement of dual big screen TVs that broadcasted tweets live.

Twitter has brought some unique innovations to the social media sphere. The most popular and well known is the ‘hashtag’, a metadata tag. By placing a hashtag message in your tweet (eg. #twitterparty), your tweet can be found easily by searching that hashtag. This tool is used by people having a shared experience such as watching a new episode of a TV show or attending a sports match.

Loosening the boundaries

The 140 character limit for a tweet has always been a terrific selling point for marketing via Twitter. The restrictions have led to creative teams producing content that is sharp, short and direct. But over time tweets have evolved. Now messages can contain images, GIFs, hyperlinks, videos, to name a few. These multimedia options are vital to increase and maintain client interaction with a message and brand. Unfortunately the adding of multimedia takes up valuable character space, with hyperlinks requiring in some cases dozens of characters to be used. Wisely, Twitter identified this issue and decided to loosen these restrictions. From late May, 2016 any multimedia or link contained in a tweet will not count towards the 140 character limit. This opens up the opportunity to add layered content to a tweet, e.g. a series of links to recipes. In a time when the public is demanding more content than ever this is a very important change for Twitter.

Past, present, future?

Founder Jack Dorsey returned to Twitter as CEO in 2015, tasked with providing a fresh vision of innovation for the company. In March, 2016 he reinforced the core values of Twitter, all of which came about as the medium evolved.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

First is the power to connect people during a live event, which has never been more obvious than during US presidential election years. Twitter had a huge increase in membership and activity during the 2008 election, and activity spiked in 2012 and again this year. “The election year has always been good to us: 2008 was a massive, massive year for us, and this is a massive year for us,” Dorsey said.

Secondly is the role of Twitter as an accompaniment to the live event. This interaction with others viewers, journalists and vested interests, as well with the resources they provide, creates a form of augmented reality. The Twitter member is no longer a passive observer but an engaged user.

Lastly Dorsey speaks about the importance of speed. That Twitter can provide information at almost real time – a non-negotiable in today’s day and age – is key to its popularity now and in the future.

Bird’s-eye view of Twitter plans

So what next for the text-based social media giant? In January, 2015 Twitter acquired the live video streaming application Periscope. Periscope enables Twitter accounts to broadcast live video to their followers. Dorsey believes the purchase of this application is aligned with Twitter’s value of event based communication.

“[W]hen there’s a lull, the internet creates something,” said Dorsey. “So what colour is this dress? And then that becomes a live event. Even when there’s nothing happening of note, something is created.”

For example, instead of waiting for a sporting event or election to take place, users can create their own live events using the video streaming function.

A local resident enjoying the Drummond puddle firsthand.

An example of this was the #DrummondPuddleWatch in January, 2016. A Twitter user in Newcastle, UK, live video-streamed a puddle that had formed on a walkway below their window. This innocuous video of Newcastle residents navigating around the bothersome puddle on a dreary day would eventually gather over 650,00 live viewers.

Twitter’s next challenge is to debunk the theory that the medium is a battleground of constant debates and interactions. Being a passive observer means you can get all your news, facts, jokes, offers by following the accounts you want without the aspects of Twitter that do not appeal. Jack Dorsey believes the ‘Moments’ tool, which sorts through the torrent of information coming from your followed accounts and selects the content best suited to the user, is the right direction and strategy to engage fully with passive new users.

Snapchat is one of the youngest platforms in social media but has certainly made an impact on the digital world very quickly. First launched in July 2011 by Evan Spiegel, Bobby Murphy and Reggie Brown under the name of ‘Picaboo’, the inspiration of the platform was finding an answer to sending images to people that you may have later regretted. In September 2011 the platform was rebranded to ‘Snapchat’ and the growth started to snowball.

In October 2013, Mark Zuckerberg offered $3 billion to buy the platform, which was swiftly rejected. In 2014 Snapchat posted revenue of $3 million, in 2015 it rose to $50 million and this year they’re projecting $350 million in revenue. In March 2016 the platform was valued at $16 billion. Wise move rejecting Zuckerberg.

Who snaps?

With over 100 million active users in 2015, users are collectively sending over 9000 snaps a second. In December 2015, 36% of Americans aged 18-29 had an account, and they are reporting over 7 billion video views each day.

Why Snapchat will soon change the way marketers market

It’s authentic

Unlike Facebook and Instagram, Snapchat doesn’t allow you to force your audience to view pushy marketing messages on its platform. So if your brand has no interest in sharing engaging stories with your audience and your only objective is to push product down your customer’s throats, then Snapchat is not for you.

The language Snapchat uses demands authenticity. Instead of a ‘timeline’ or ‘newsfeed’ on Snapchat, you view a person’s or business’s ‘stories’. This playfulness and impermanence forces users to be their true selves and businesses need to follow suit.

Snapchat is easy to use, but it’s hard to be good at. Businesses who master and engage this platform early will be the winners.

It’s real-time two-way communication

All social media allows us to speak directly to our audience, but it doesn’t necessarily allow for two-way communication.

Many corporate Twitter and Facebook accounts will badge themselves as the platform where you can have a real time conversation with a representative from the organisation, but is it an honest and authentic conversation? On many of these accounts you’ll view stock standard responses coming from businesses, but what if customers could snap you a video of their enquiry and they could receive an immediate and custom response via chat or video? Customer service brilliance.

It’s marketing disguised as messaging

Through Snapchat brands are provided a direct line to their customers and, with the recent automation of the ‘Snapchat story’, this almost guarantees your followers will view your content.

Unlike Facebook, Twitter and Instagram there’s no clever algorithm determining what users see; it’s simply delivered to them almost in message form. This again highlights the need for businesses to be authentic and creative with their content because pushy marketing will quickly be viewed as spam and will result in your customers unfollowing you.

So what is planned for the future?

Sharing functionality

Users currently cannot share content they view on Snapchat, but have hinted that this development is on its way. If you were able to ‘re-snap’ images or videos that were sent directly to you, it would almost defeat the original intent of the platform; so we’re predicting that this will be a function of the ‘story’ in the not so distant future.

Analytics

Snapchat won’t give you too much insight into who’s viewing your snaps and their finer demographics, but this will be here soon. With the rise of businesses and influencers paying attention to the platform, this is a natural and important next step.

Snapcodes

A snapcode is Snapchat’s version of a QR code. While the QR may have recently fizzled away, we might see the renaissance of this function via Snapchat to benefit brands by allowing followers to access exclusive offers and events.

While Snapchat has a long way to come if it’s to become the number one social network, the growth and demographics of this platform cannot be ignored. Consider how you can incorporate Snapchat into your social media strategy and the value this could add to your customers’ interaction with your brand.

InSocial Motive‘s series on the five core social motives, we explore just what it is that drives us to feel, think and act.

According to social psychologist Dr Susan Fiske, the basis behind our decisions in social situations can be distilled into five core motives: trust, understanding, growing, influencing, and belonging.

Understanding these five core social motives is essential to any situation where we interact with other people; in essence, the five core social motives make up the very fabric of our lives.

To grow

It is a daily tension that physical growth and maturation don’t exactly correlate with mental and emotional growth. Rather than being disheartened by this, people all over the world try every day to achieve little victories in their lives and grow as people.

This social motive ‘to grow,’ this striving to reach our potential – which Abraham Maslow described as the pinnacle of the human experience – is a motive to which those lucky enough to live in the developed world can devote considerable time and effort.

Why is it important to grow?

As humans, one of our points of cultural pride is our accumulation of wisdom, information and technology, the inter-generational communication of which holds primacy in much of our shared narrative. It is therefore no wonder that much of our art and media is about maturing, learning life lessons, going on adventures of discovery, and why one of the most loved narrative tropes is the ‘rags to riches’ story (e.g. Harry Potter, Cinderella, Slumdog Millionaire, Bridget Jones’s Diary and the lives ofOprah Winfrey, Susan Boyle and Richard Branson) – in essence, growing up.

The success story of Richard Branson is well-known and a classic rags-to-riches narrative.

What does growing look like?

Bridget Jones’s goals were to get a boyfriend (hopefully the right one), a better job and a bit of (self-) respect. Once she understood how these aspirational goals defined her, she set out doing her best to achieve them. By the end of the film she had accomplished her goals and had grown as a person.

The efforts Bridget made during 97 minutes of screen time propelled her to grow and enhance her ‘Self’; but her external achievements would not have been possible without internal growth and her mind being in the right place. Growth, then, is as much about accumulating and ticking off boxes as it is about learning and gaining understanding.

How do we grow?

Name three life goals off the top of your head. You can probably name three goals for this year alone too, this week or even this day. The fact that these are prominent in your mind means (or should mean) that the decisions you are making and actions you are taking are moving you towards achieving or manifesting those goals.

But what products, services and people are available to you to help you achieve those goals and, therefore, grow as a person? Are you a cyclist? Chances are you read up on cycling news, products, courses, races. If you want to buy your first investment property, you will be reading the property news, be a part of the real estate groups on Facebook, subscribed to newsletters. If your goal is as broad – but important – as simply wanting to be happy, you will understand what makes you happy and be striving to achieve those things.

What does it mean for digital communications and social media?

Growth and self-actualisation are the aspirational factors that motivate individuals to participate in any activity, acquisition or consumption. With disposable income and social mobility, people are free to decide how they define themselves and what their goals are.

In digital communications and social media – and in the age of the individual – attempts to manipulate those goals or aspirations are wasteful and often insulting.

With the enormous reach and market potential offered by digital channels, the clever strategy is to increase your visibility and announce your presence to those with goals that are aligned with your product or service offering. This serves the dual role of empowering consumers and saving your business money. Compare the waste of using a big net for a certain type of fish, rather than many fishing rods with the lure that suits your chosen fish.

The material wealth of Harry was always a distant second to the wealth he accumulated in respect, experience, family and friends.

The key, then, is to identify what your audience hungers for. What is their lure? What is it that makes them tick? What are the life goals that helps them to grow? On digital channels, you can discover this simply by researching what pages your audience likes, what they comment on, what groups they are a part of, what images they share (essentially their metadata) – in effect, you need to watch, listen and do your homework.

Those with the opportunity to pursue growth will be making decisions daily that move them towards attaining their daily/weekly/yearly life goals. If you can identify those goals then you can identify what your product or service is going to offer, what your marketing message is going to be and, therefore, how you are going to help your customer, client or audience to grow.

The internal and external growth of Jamal parallel each other throughout Slumdog Millionaire.

That brings to a close our series on the five social motives. Understanding of these motives is an important part of understanding who we are as individuals and communities and it is vital to success in a socially-connected world. Thanks for reading. Be sure to check into Social Motive for regular discussion on communications and marketing in the digital sphere.

The last decade has seen countless new players enter the social media landscape. In this evolving environment, YouTube seems to have been unaffected by the change and has kept its position as one of the most popular platforms without having to go through any major transformations. In 2015, the website celebrated its 10-year anniversary, but this year marks a decade since the three founders sold the company to Google and the service truly took off.

Today, YouTube has 1.3 billion unique users every month. This stratospheric number has been achieved by making the decision to keep the platform free and is perhaps best illustrated by the failed attempt to integrate YouTube with Google+ in 2011 – a severe misfire and a lesson in the power of unrestricted access.

Maru is one of the world’s most popular cats on YouTube.

Who uses YouTube?

So, who are these 1.3 billion people? Firstly, not just bored teenagers. The original target group of people aged 12 to 17 has expanded and large quantities of users are today found in all age groups. Second, these 1.3 billion users don’t sit in front of their computers. As a matter of fact, more than 50% of the views on YouTube come from mobile devices. For content creators, this means that you are not making films for a 27-inch monitor, but rather for a 5-inch mobile screen. And third, the users are spread all across the world: 80% of the views are from outside the U.S. This means that uploaded videos instantly reach a global audience.

Even though YouTube offers the traditional features of a social media site – users create, share and exchange information through profiles, comments and groups – it has an exceptional focus on content. When looking at the future of YouTube, this cannot be forgotten. While Twitter and Facebook mainly focus on sharing and engagement of content, YouTube helps create it. Even comments from YouTube users sometimes take the form of videos, a sign of how much more effective and direct the medium of video can be compared to text.

With over 44 million subscribers, PewDiePie is the world’s most influential content producer.

The focus on content – and especially on video content – seems to be required to remain on top on the social media ladder. Predictions show that in just three years time, online video will make up 80% of all internet traffic. That is a lot of traffic. It also means that YouTube should prepare itself for a serious increase in competing services, something that is happening as we speak – notably from Facebook and Snapchat.

With this in mind: what does the future look like for YouTube? Which trends in the development of the platform can be identified?

More types of content

The perception that YouTube has gone through very few changes during the last decade probably comes from the fact that its interface hasn’t changed much. In reality, the service has constantly been evolving. In 2010, the first live streams were transmitted. The same year, a film rental service was introduced. More recent changes have seen the introduction of 360-degrees videos, the music streaming service Music Key and a gaming platform, connecting the rising phenomenon of Let’s Play videos.

A complement to the entertaining content is an increasing amount of educational videos produced by the highest-ranked universities. Expect this shift to an entertainment hub – where users both watch, listen, learn and play – to continue.

Premium services

Unlike other video-sharing websites, the content creators on YouTube are paid. This monetisation of videos has run into problems caused by ad blockers. Users block ads not because they are freeloaders, but because they are frustrated over bad user experiences. Therefore, the rise of ad blockers should be seen as a sign that different monetisation models must be explored. One of YouTube’s ways of battling this is the introduction of the paid subscription service YouTube Red.

Gone are the days when everything on YouTube was accessible. With these content access restrictions, television networks – in the process of moving from traditional broadcasting to video-on-demand – are intrigued by this new way of reaching users. Gone then are the days when YouTube’s competitors solely were Facebook, Vimeo and VK. The divide between video and online video will be harder to detect, meaning YouTube is now also competing with streaming media providers like Netflix and Hulu and large television networks like HBO.

Live and social

For YouTube and its users, there is no long-term gain in viral videos. To keep an audience it is more important to build a narrative with a series of videos, to get people to stay by making them want to hear the next part of the story. Once again, this is not done by tricks or deceptions, but by providing the best possible content – just like NBC’s Must See TV in the 90s.

A big issue expected to arise in the next couple of years is YouTube’s proper integration of live streaming. When will YouTube outbid the giant cable companies and start to stream live sport? This will happen, and when it does it is a pivotal step in taking down the television business as we know it. With the rise of more live content, the community aspect will increase in importance. People will watch the same content at the same time, and they will want to discuss it with other viewers, as it happens. YouTube is, and most certainly will be in the future, a social platform.

Who needs a television to watch the news?

In summary, the next decade of YouTube will see more big players enter the stage. On one hand this can be seen as a narrowing of the product – with less bottom up production, funny clips from individuals will have less impact – on the other hand, it will broaden the platform with the inclusion of games, virtual reality, live sport and a blurred distinction between online content and big television productions.

With both the content creators and the audience moving into this new environment, the advertisers must follow. To be successful, it is necessary to have the courage to step away from traditional ways of marketing through TV, radio and newspapers, and start to see the possibilities of entering the rapidly growing hub of digital entertainment that is YouTube.

We all know the founding story of Facebook, but in case you’re not up to speed, here’s a quick recap:

‘The Facebook’ was founded on 4 February, 2014, in the dorm rooms of Harvard University. Initially its purpose was to allow students to find information on other students of the institution. Within the first month, over half of Harvard’s students were registered on the platform and Zuckerberg decided to make the social network available to other colleges.

In 2006, Zucks opened the platform up to anyone who was 13 years or older who had a valid email address. By late 2007 there were over 20 million users and 100,000 businesses registered on the platform, which sparked the development of a new concept called ‘company pages’. These rolled out in 2009.

The growth of Facebook for individual and business users has been astronomical over the past decade and it is reported that over one billion people are now registered to the platform and over 40 million small businesses have launched a Facebook page.

So how does the future look for Facebook? Will it continue to develop and grow? Of course!

Facebook is a maturing platform and its pattern in demographics proves that. In 2009 only 2.9% of Facebook users were over 55 years old. In 2015 that figure was sitting at 15.6%. What about teenagers though? After all, in 10 years’ time this is who we, as business owners and marketers, will be targeting.

The good news is that, while other platforms are on the rise for the adolescent demographic, Facebook is still the number one site – 71% of teens say they use the site regularly. Furthermore, 41% of those surveyed said that Facebook was their number one choice for social networking, with Instagram and Snapchat growing quickly behind it.

If we look at how Facebook has evolved their offering over the past decade, it’s not hard to see that Zucks and his team are putting plans in place to take over the internet. They want Facebook to be the first website you visit at the start of your day and they don’t want you to leave. The introduction of Facebook stores, video content and instant articles are just a few examples of this. Why would you visit a newspaper’s website when you can just read the news on your Facebook feed? Well played.

So what will Facebook look like in 10 years? Here are a few predictions that Mark Zuckerberg talked through in his recent live fireside chat in Berlin.

10 Year road map for Facebook

Connectivity

Zuckerberg wants to bring the internet to more people and, in turn, more people to Facebook. There are currently 7 billion people in the world and only 3 billion of them are connected to the internet. Zuckerberg wants to work with the relevant companies to bend the curve in who is connected online and is hopeful that, by 2025, 3 billion will be sitting closer to 7 billion.

Artificial Intelligence

In the next 10 years, Facebook wants to “build systems that are better than people at perception”. At the moment, the challenge is ‘unsupervised learning,’ where machines can infer what they don’t know about and have no positive or negative reinforcement for providing a solution. That’s a bigger picture problem though, and Facebook is focusing its attention on voice recognition, self driving cars and bot software.

Facebook wants to build true human-like interactions between man and machine. It will be able to interpret intent from natural language and develop over time. An example is, when you type ‘I’m hungry’ a bot can pick that up and offer to order you the sandwich that you always get from your local sandwich bar. You will no longer need to find your customers, a bot will literally delver them to you. Madness.

Virtual and augmented reality

Zuckerberg: “I think virtual reality has the potential to be the most social platform, because you feel like you’re right there with the person.” Preceding this, he had shown a video of two people playing a game in the same VR room, yet neither of them were anywhere near each other while they were playing. Weird!

Mark Zuckerberg wears an Oculus Rift virtual reality headset

Zuckerberg admits that VR and AR are still at least 10 years off, but similar to the mainstream introduction of the smartphone, they expect that the update will be a game changer.

Facebook is currently the most dominant player in social media and its future plans are to ensure that this doesn’t change. It is continuously growing the user base and constantly working to offer users more features and functionality so users never have to leave the site.

And just remember, while Zuckerberg’s top three predictions for the future may seem a little out of reach for your business at the moment, in 2006 so was the prospect of a smartphone.

The Facebook-owned photo- and video-sharing network said in an email to SocialTimes that Taco Bell, ASOS, Macy’s and Airbnb are among the advertisers involved in the beta-test, and the feature will be made more widely available “in the coming weeks.”

Instagram carousel ads can still contain three to five pieces of content, both photos and videos, and the maximum length for videos is 60 seconds.

Global head of business and brand development James Quarles said in an email to SocialTimes:

The hardest thing to do is capture a consumer’s imagination. The immersive nature of sequential video allows people to quickly learn if the brand is for you and whether it fits your life.